David, listening to Seinfeld being interviewed, offered some appreciation for his longtime partner. “I am watching the greatest interviewee ever,” he said. “This is a beauty.”
“Larry always marvels at my ability to just come up with horseshit for these interviews.”
“I’ve probably read over two hundred interviews,” David said. “Each one is different: always something new about the show, about life, about something. I’m amazed. I stand in awe. The greatest bullshitter on this planet.”
“It’s good bullshit,” Seinfeld said. “Good, salable bullshit.”
Old friends of the show milled about on the set that week, even if they weren’t involved in the production. Throughout the week of filming, the atmosphere was a party, joyous. Kenny Kramer had VIP access, and roamed about from the craft services’ food table to the stands.
Writer Peter Mehlman was no longer working for the show, but his new office was still on the lot, so he stopped by. He attended the table read for the final episode, and thought it held up pretty well. Sure, it was a little more blatant, a little rawer, than anything the show had done before. But no matter what this finale did, he figured, it couldn’t live up to its hype. It had an hour-plus to fill and tens of millions of viewers waiting for it. What could it do?
Alexander liked it, too, because it allowed for a reunion-type atmosphere. Characters like the Soup Nazi, the Low-Talker, and so many others had made such a huge difference in the show but had disappeared from the set before anyone knew how important they’d be. This allowed them all to return for a thank-you.
For director Andy Ackerman, the finale was a logistical nightmare, mainly due to the extraordinary amount of press attention. (There were even press helicopters hovering as the crew shot on location.) Rolling Stone and Katie Couric were on set for sanctioned coverage. At every location, there were more press and paparazzi trying to get even a scrap of information. A few photographers scaled the studio wall near New York Street. A security guard was stationed on the set around the clock because random items were starting to disappear.
That week, Richards found himself newly preoccupied with the intricacies of his character. He asked himself, “How does Kramer function in a courtroom? How does he behave in jail? How does his view of life change from behind bars, if at all?” He’d always been asking questions like, “How does Kramer relate to a woman? What is his whole deal with a woman?” throughout his nine years as the character. But this episode tested his limits because of its outlandish story line.
When the writers saw the final product coming together, they loved it. O’Keefe later told me he thought it was a “conscious return to the roots of the show.”
On April 8, 1998, at 6:30 P.M., the cast of Seinfeld gathered in front of their final studio audience to film their 180th episode. The audience members had all signed secrecy affidavits. Backstage, the four stars held hands as the introductions began, just as they did before every taping, a tradition they called the “circle of power.” Seinfeld got misty-eyed. “I want to say something,” he said to his costars. “For the rest of our lives, when anyone thinks of one of us, they will think of all four of us. And I can’t think of three people I’d rather have that be true of.” Louis-Dreyfus and Alexander wiped away tears, while Richards grunted emotionally.
They took their places on the courtroom set. “Do you know what these four people were?” raved Phil Morris, who played attorney Jackie Chiles, in his opening statement scene. Louis-Dreyfus covered her giggles by looking down in mock distress. “They were innocent bystanders. Now you just think about that term, ‘innocent bystanders.’ Because that’s exactly what they were. How can a bystander be guilty? Have you ever heard of a guilty bystander?”
They filmed until past 2:00 A.M. The final shot was as it began: Jerry, doing stand-up. This time, for the final scene, his stand-up routine would be in prison. Only one problem: The scene, a late addition, had no script. This episode was the first time his stand-up had been incorporated into an episode since the seventh season. Seinfeld had thought others were handling it amid the finale hoopla; everyone else figured that since it was a stand-up scene, Seinfeld would write his own jokes. The writers and producers assembled and started throwing jokes out until a few stuck. Finally, they wrapped.
Seinfeld said another tired thank-you to his castmates and crew. Alexander and Louis-Dreyfus both thanked Seinfeld back: “Because you don’t hear that enough,” Alexander said.
Mehlman left as soon as the shoot was over. He had created a new sitcom for ABC, called It’s Like, You Know. The first table read for the pilot was the following morning. He tore himself away from the festivities and said good-bye to David and Seinfeld. “God, I feel like I’m sending my kid off to college,” David said.
Seinfeld added, “Here it is, take the baton, run with it.” Mehlman couldn’t have felt better.
Ackerman had a hard time leaving the set that night. He stayed for hours after most people had left, lingering with just his wife, Seinfeld, Dave Mandel, Alec Berg, and Jeff Schaffer. They hung around until 5:00 A.M., sitting on the diner set. Finally, they each grabbed a keepsake from the set and left, heading out into the foggy, damp morning. Schaffer would never tell what he took.
ON MAY 14, 1998, ABOUT a hundred protesters gathered outside NBC’s glistening corporate tower at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, holding posters branding Seinfeld a “racist.” They waved Puerto Rican flags and chanted: “NBC, don’t you know, Puerto Ricans are no joke!” The previous week’s episode, featuring the Puerto Rican Day Parade, had ignited controversy among Puerto Rican activists who said it was an “unconscionable insult” that “crossed the line between humor and bigotry.”
Of course, something bigger was distracting most of America from the issue. As the protesters milled in Midtown, actors Dave Chappelle and Tom Hanks wrapped shooting on a scene at Café Lalo for the romantic comedy film You’ve Got Mail, then rushed to a bar around the corner to catch the Seinfeld finale. Another thirty blocks uptown, actress Susan Sarandon, novelist Frank McCourt, and the actor who played Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi,” Larry Thomas, gathered at a red-carpet event at Tom’s Restaurant. Maxim magazine had rented the diner out to celebrate the Seinfeld finale’s airing that night. And 2,800 miles west, the cast and crew of Seinfeld were watching the broadcast in a private screening room on the Warner Brothers lot in Los Angeles.
The seventy-five-minute final Seinfeld episode aired that evening, laying to rest all the crazy theories floating about. Seinfeld loomed so large over the television landscape that other networks took the rare step of going Seinfeld-meta in tribute. TV Land, a network built on syndicated reruns of sitcom classics, broadcast only a closed office door featuring a note that said, “Gone watchin’ SEINFELD.” ABC’s Dharma and Greg aired an episode called “Much Ado About Nothing,” which included a line about how everybody in the country was watching the Seinfeld finale. Competing, it seemed, was futile. The episode even showed on big screens live in Times Square. “I’m sad to see it go,” one fan told People magazine as he watched there. “But that’s what reruns are for.”
Seinfeld appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno later that night to discuss the show’s end as the audience chanted, “Jer-ry! Jer-ry!” In response, he quipped, “What the hell, I’ll do one more season. Come on, let’s go.”
NBC’s finale extravaganza attracted 76 million viewers. (It was the third most-watched sitcom finale in TV history, after M*A*S*H and Cheers.) Everyone involved with the show was happy with the results—until they started hearing the public reaction the next day. Seinfeld would go down in history, it turned out, as having one of the most memorable, most watched, and most hated finales.
Entertainment Weekly critic Ken Tucker wrote: “Talk about sour grapes: Returning cocreator David turns spiteful, unforgiving moralist, making Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer pay for all their years of ‘selfishness, self-absorption, immaturity, and greed.’ . . . Retribution prevailed: It’s as i
f David forgot that in nearly every episode invoked, the gang was made to suffer for whatever wrongdoing they committed. It’s not as if Jerry got off scot-free for mugging that old woman for her marble rye; as if George didn’t pay for going cheap on those wedding invitations. This crew led miserable lives, and we relished their exceptional pettiness. That they should be punished for all the vicarious fun we had at their expense is David’s way of saying we never should have made these cruel losers Must See–worthy.”
The New York Observer’s Ron Rosenbaum went further: “The ludicrously humorless, pathetically strained and witless final episode was confirmation beyond my wildest dreams of just how insanely overrated the show has always been. It was more than the most titanic flop in comedy history—although it certainly was that. It was the culmination of one of the greatest episodes of mass-media-induced mass hysteria in recent American history. One that the sycophants, perpetrators and promoters of the hype should all feel thoroughly ashamed of, in the awful light of the morning after one of the worst hours of television since the cathode-ray tube was invented.”
Not everyone hated it, though. Online chatter favorably compared the final episode’s plotline to Albert Camus’s The Stranger, while noting hints of Sartre’s existentialist classic No Exit. And Caryn James wrote in the New York Times: “The hilarious final episode was everything Seinfeld was at its best: mordant, unsentimental and written by Larry David. . . . Wildly self-referential and slightly surreal, the final episode revels in petty details, turns clichés on their heads and reveals why Seinfeld worked so well.”
The news came out the next day that eighty-two-year-old Frank Sinatra had died at his Beverly Hills home during the finale. His wife and emergency crews were able to rush him to the hospital faster than they normally would have because the streets of Los Angeles were so clear. Everyone was home watching the Seinfeld finale.
THE REAL-LIFE VERSION OF JERRY Seinfeld publicly killed off his notoriously single “Jerry Seinfeld” character a year and a half after the show’s demise. Seinfeld, now forty-five, proffered a Tiffany diamond ring and proposed to his new girlfriend, twenty-eight-year-old publicist Jessica Sklar, in an amber-lit booth of the trendy Balthazar restaurant in SoHo in November 1999. The two had become a brief tabloid sensation in the fall of 1998 when she left a wealthy new husband to pursue a relationship with Seinfeld. The two had met at a ritzy Reebok Sports Club near Seinfeld’s Upper West Side apartment just before her June 1998 wedding to Broadway theater heir Eric Nederlander and a month after the Seinfeld finale. She went through with the wedding, then left her new husband for Seinfeld three weeks after the ceremony.
By October, gossip pages couldn’t get enough of Jerry-and-Jessica spottings, shopping at fancy food store Zabar’s, cheering on the sidelines of the New York City Marathon, and cuddling in corners of the gym. The National Enquirer blared, “Seinfeld Steals Another Man’s Wife,” and People magazine asked, “Master of Whose Domain?” As Nederlander filed for divorce, he took public shots at his ex and her famous new beau: “I was manipulated, misled and completely caught off guard by Jessica’s infidelity,” he told the New York Post in 1998. “Jerry and Jessica have no respect for decent values. They deserve each other.” They seemed publicly unfazed, vacationing together in Hawaii and Aspen and Sicily.
When news of Seinfeld’s engagement broke, Tom’s Restaurant owner Michael Zoulis spoke for the nation. Upon hearing the news from a People magazine reporter, he cracked: “It’s about time.” Just a year later, Jerry Seinfeld was not only a husband but also a father. Jessica gave birth to their daughter, Sascha. Soon after, Seinfeld went back on the road, returning to stand-up.
SEINFELD TOURED AUSTRALIA—A HOTBED of Seinfeld fandom—and Europe before coming back to Broadway in his hometown. On August 9, 1998, he performed live on television from the Broadhurst Theatre in an HBO special, I’m Telling You for the Last Time, a final run-through of all his previous material before he retired it and came up with an entirely fresh routine.
HBO knew where its bread was buttered. It touted the special: “You thought the Seinfeld finale was the year’s must-see TV event? Wait until August 9, when Jerry Seinfeld returns to television to star in his first stand-up TV special in over a decade.” The cable network’s prized shows Sex and the City and Arli$$ were pushed back an hour from their normal time slots to make room for the Seinfeld special. “For the past nine years, Jerry Seinfeld has played a stand-up comedian on the most acclaimed sitcom of the decade,” an HBO marketing memo said, “but not once has the real Jerry performed a full-length stand-up routine on TV.”
When the day came for the broadcast, picketers once again gathered to protest the “Puerto Rican Day Parade” episode, this time outside the Broadhurst. Audience members who’d paid $75 a ticket streamed in, along with celebrity guests such as Chris Rock and Richard Belzer. After the taping, Seinfeld and his longtime manager, George Shapiro, went to Coney Island to ride the Cyclone roller coaster, a ritual for them after performances. Jerry Seinfeld was now out of the sitcom business and back in the stand-up business.
His costars were moving on, too. Louis-Dreyfus decided to take some time off to spend with her husband and two young sons. Jason Alexander had a two-year deal with Studios USA to produce new series. Richards teamed up with Seinfeld writers Spike Feresten, Gregg Kavet, and Andy Robin to create a pilot for The Michael Richards Show, which featured the actor as a Kramer-like detective in Los Angeles.
Feresten felt some trepidation but agreed to the project anyway. “I just felt an obligation to these people,” he said. “Launching a show is really hard. It doesn’t matter who you are. The idea wasn’t quite right. It was too soon to bring Michael back.” Kavet felt it would have been better the way they had originally pitched it, as a single-camera comedy, but NBC had balked. It lasted two months, from October to December 2000, before being canceled.
The actors moved on from Seinfeld, but Seinfeld continued to live on—in fact, it lives on to this day. From the minute it ended, its influence and reach only began to grow. Unmoored from that weekly prime-time series called Seinfeld, the idea of Seinfeld spread further and mutated faster. It became Seinfeldia.
12
Seinfeldia Emerges
RICK LIPPS HAD JUST MADE the biggest bet of his young career. During the first syndication cycle of Seinfeld in 1995, he served as the general manager of KLBK, the CBS affiliate in Lubbock, Texas, a nondescript town in that squared-off part of the cowboy hat atop the state’s head. He bought the show for about $90,000 per episode, beating out the other stations in his market for the new golden goose of off-network reruns. The show’s distributor, Columbia Pictures Television, had given him a shiny Montblanc pen that cost hundreds of dollars just to sign the contract. He treasured the pen for years after.
Even as he signed, he reassured himself: This was a slam dunk for the 10:30 P.M. slot to swap in for Late Night with David Letterman, a chronic underperformer in his market. Letterman came in fourth in the ratings in Lubbock, beaten by NBC’s The Tonight Show and syndicated episodes of M*A*S*H and Cheers on other stations.
For the three months in the spring of 1995 leading up to that contract signing, Lipps had considered snagging Seinfeld for his station. Now that he’d gotten it, Lipps was still fretting, even while his colleagues rejoiced.
Rick Lipps needed to pick hits.
Lipps couldn’t rest easy, even though Seinfeld was popular and had the sexiest demographics in television—young, hip, upwardly mobile audiences loved it. But Rick Lipps had made some big slips. He’d paid top dollar for Growing Pains, a pleasant, popular family show he’d seen as a sure thing, only to watch it tank in the afternoon. Roseanne and Empty Nest had washed out in the market as well.
Lipps’s career remained in its formative stages. He was in his late twenties, now at his second job managing a local station in the bottom half of the nationwide media market rankings. He’d come to Lubbock from a job in Monroe, Louisiana—a town with about a quarter of
Lubbock’s population—and this could be a make-or-break job. Lipps had grown up in the tiny Southern Illinois town of Mt. Vernon, sixty miles east of St. Louis, where routes 57 and 64 meet, watching TV but never imagining he’d be part of it. After Lipps graduated from Florida State University with a biology degree, a roommate’s dad hired him as a cameraman for one of the local stations he owned. From there, he built a career.
Now he found himself throwing millions of dollars around in hopes that enough people in Lubbock, Texas, wanted to watch reruns of this so-called “show about nothing.” And syndication decisions could determine the success or failure of a station manager, who could lose a job because of a bad deal. A misstep could mean pulling a show off the air but continuing to pay the fees for the duration of the contract.
Three months later, terrible news: Bank of America sold KLBK to a company called Petracom in August 1995. A new network-affiliate agreement was part of the deal, and it required all stations to run Letterman. With about a month before the new season started, Lipps needed a new place for Seinfeld. He couldn’t afford to let it sit on the shelf while he paid the show’s lofty fees. But now Seinfeld would be stuck with the only other available time slot, 4:00 P.M., between Maury Povich’s show and Jeopardy!—not a big-bucks spot in terms of advertisers. What local car dealership wanted to pay top dollar for a time when primary breadwinners were still at work? Worse, the lineup had zero flow, as they called the compatibility among shows scheduled in a block. A tabloid talk show, a sophisticated sitcom, and a game show? Who wanted to watch all that in a row? Of the 194 markets that carried syndicated Seinfeld reruns, only two scheduled it earlier than Lipps’s station had. All others placed it in the half hour before prime time, or in late-night.
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